The Early Buzz on ‘Boyz’: It’s All Too Real

Nadia Battle found herself fighting tears during a recent screening of “Boyz N the Hood,” John Singleton’s movie based on life in a South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood.

The vivid images were all too real for the 30-year-old Community Youth Gang Services counselor, who lost a brother in a gang shooting.

Battle took 17 gang members with her to watch the film at a special preview screening at Columbia Pictures. “I was crying and I looked over to the side and my little killers were crying too,” Battle said. “All that cussing and killing, it was real. And it’s always the innocent person that gets killed. That’s what I felt truly needed to be publicized.”

“Boyz N the Hood” revolves around two black families’ struggles to raise their teen-age sons in a tough L.A. neighborhood. The movie opens Friday in about 800 theaters nationwide.

So far, Battle and more than 3,000 other people in Los Angeles have seen “Boyz N the Hood” in 25 special screenings set up as part of Columbia’s release strategy.

For one thing, the cast, despite the presence of rapper Ice Cube and actor Larry Fishburne, doesn’t ensure that the film will “open” strongly; the studio is trying to spread strong word-of-mouth about “Boyz.”

But Columbia has also showed the film to a diverse audience including youth counselors, social workers, politicians, psychiatrists and police officers, a guest list the studio drew up with the help of Uniworld, a black marketing firm. The object was to identify and show the movie to L.A.’s black opinion leaders, who would get the word out to youthful and older audiences that “Boyz N the Hood” is, as the studio wants to emphasize, a “coming of age movie” that does not endorse gang violence.

Some people who have seen the movie have praised its portrayal of a strong black single father who raises his son to manhood in a neighborhood where young children at play find bloody corpses in a nearby vacant lot. It is a compelling, realistic story, some viewers have said, that is finally being told with sensitivity and understanding by a young black filmmaker who grew up in the area where the movie takes place.

However, others raise concerns about its depiction of everyday acts of violence in one black neighborhood and the gang members who operate there. Some counselors who work with gang members worry that the movie’s positive message about how a black family largely avoids gang involvement may escape frustrated inner-city youths too close to the violence to distinguish between poignant filmmaking and real life. They wonder whether the movie’s identification of certain gangs by name and the subtle use of hand signals, trademark colors and attire to denote others will encourage some impressionable youths to act out their aggressions.

“I just hope the gangs will accept the movie for what it is and what it represents and not take it any further,” Battle said. “I went all the way to my pastor and asked him to pray.”

Dr. Eugene Jennings, a psychiatrist at UCLA Medical Center currently working on a research project about gangs, says these are valid concerns.

“You’re talking about folks who are very angry about the way they are living,” said Jennings, who has seen the film. “Common sense would tell you that you would have to be very careful when showing a film like this in the summer”--when most youths are out of school with idle time on their hands.

Columbia Pictures Chairman Frank Price calls such remarks “ridiculous.”

“It’s just like saying you shouldn’t let Eugene O’Neill tell stories about the Irish because it will drive them to drink,” Price said.

The release of “Boyz N the Hood” is not the first time that someone has raised concerns that a movie based on life in the inner city could inspire violent incidents. Some predicted that Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” would incite rioting when it opened two summers ago. But those fears proved unfounded.

Columbia’s efforts to defuse concerns about the movie included inviting Los Angeles police officers who work with gangs to preview screenings. “Someone telephoned me and said they had complimentary passes that they would like to offer to the officers of this department--particularly those who work gang detail,” LAPD spokesman Fred Nixon said. “She said they were making (passes) available to various segments of the community and the Police Department was just one of those segments.”

Nixon said he accepted the passes after the studio representative assured him that Columbia was not seeking the department’s “input” on the film. “I asked that question specifically because as a department we are not movie critics and we don’t want to be in that position,” Nixon said. “As far as we know, it’s simply entertainment.”

Los Angeles policewoman Tina Ayala, one of about a dozen Los Angeles officers who saw “Boyz N the Hood” at a recent screening, dismissed speculation that the movie could influence gangs.

“I don’t think so because it didn’t portray gangs in a positive light,” said Ayala, who works in the gang intelligence division of Operation South Bureau CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). “I’m sure there are some gang members out there who are very stubborn and feel that that’s the only way they can survive, but there are others who are thinking of getting involved and hopefully this movie will make them think it over.”

But for Tony Hull, 29, a lifelong resident of South-Central Los Angeles, “Boyz N the Hood “ is more than just entertainment.

The film brought back a rush of memories: Car clubs gathering to cruise Crenshaw Boulevard on Sunday nights, shootouts erupting without warning between rival gang members over something as simple as the color one is wearing.

“It was a good movie and I love the way it was shot,” said Hull, who is president of Freshhh Scorts, a Crenshaw area car club made up of 25 young men and women who drive Escorts--some of which he says were used as props in the movie. “I just say to whoever watches it, look at it as a movie and don’t take it too seriously.”

Mike Salgado, president of an Orange County gang counseling organization called Parents Against a Gang Environment, fears that youths will identify with one gang’s vengeance on another.

“Some gangs are recognized by name in this movie, like the Crenshaw Mafia. Others are (depicted) by the wearing of the Chicago Bulls red,” Salgado said. “It will definitely push the rivalry between what is known as the red and the blue.”

Salgado was also troubled by the way the police are depicted in the movie. “The police are definitely portrayed badly,” Salgado said, “particularly with the movie coming out so close to the Rodney King incident. We felt this would only heighten tensions and asked Columbia to postpone the release of the movie.”

However, Columbia’s Price says such concerns are premature and unfounded.

“No.1, the movie is not dealing with gangs in any way. It shows the tragedy from the circumstances they confront,” he said. “I think people can come up with all sorts of fears but here is a film by a brilliant young filmmaker. He has a point of view and he understands the society he is talking about.”

Although the movie was written and directed by a black man, some believe “Boyz N the Hood” reinforces negative stereotypes of blacks by its depiction of gangs, prostitution and drug dealing.

Los Angeles NAACP Vice President William Upton describes the film as an example of the movie industry’s preoccupation with inner-city ills while excluding the positive aspects of black life.

“After the movie I asked, ‘Why can’t they ever make a movie about a little boy that grows up to be a success?”’ Upton said. “One reason is that the white mind can only look at the tragedies of the inner city. They don’t want to look at the good things.”

“It’s not what we as black people want to see,” said Patricia Patrick, founder of Mothers Against Gangs in Our Community, a Los Angeles based anti-gang group. “It’s what we can sell to the movie industry.

Tim Rideout, a spokesman for the Western Region office of the NAACP, says criticism about the movie’s social message are out of place.

“Making movies is a business,” Rideout said. “I just hate to see that with every black film, (a black director) has to justify his work to the whole culture. (Singleton’s) just doing the best he can at his craft.”